Police have waded into rallies, beating protesters indiscriminately. The international press corps now covering the rallies is wearing motorcycle helmets to avoid head injuries.

And it is all playing out against the backdrop of the civil war with the Maoist guerrillas who control vast areas of the countryside, a war which has already cost at least 12,000 lives and has just restarted after the Maoists abandoned a unilateral ceasefire. What started out as demonstrations demanding the King restore democracy and give up the autocratic powers he seized a year ago is fast developing into a movement against the monarchy.

Sanu Raja Shakya, a protester, said: "We don't want a monarchy. It's too heavy a burden. It's useless for the country. What room is there for a monarchy in the 21st century?"

The protesters have vowed to boycott municipal elections being held on 8 February, saying they are just a figleaf for the King to claim he is restoring democracy. Yesterday's strike was held in part to prevent candidates filing their papers.

The Maoists have threatened to target any candidate. They have already killed one, and so serious is the situation that the government is offering special life insurance to anyone brave enough to stand.

King Gyanendra came to power only after most of the royal family was killed in 2001 in a massacre blamed on the then Crown Prince, who is said to have shot most of his family in a drunken rage.

Last year, King Gyanendra sacked the government and seized back the absolute powers of a medieval king. He suspended the most basic human rights, including freedom of speech, claiming that it was necessary to defeat the Maoists. But one year on, he has failed to make headway against the Maoists. The street protests have pitted the King directly against an alliance of the seven democratic parties that he forced from power. They organise the rallies and they called yesterday's general strike.

Crucially, the party leaders have held face-to-face meetings with Prachanda, the elusive leader of the Maoists, who has been in hiding for many years.

They have negotiated the framework for a peace process, and the Maoists have signed a 12-point agreement that includes a commitment to multi-party democracy. The King has accused the parties of playing into the hands of the Maoists.

Madhav Kumar Nepal, a party leader who met the Maoist, said: "It's very difficult to say whether I trust Prachanda or not. But I want to start by giving him the benefit of the doubt.

"If the Maoists have made a commitment to democracy, to peaceful means, to human rights, shouldn't we give them the opportunity to fulfil it? If they don't keep their word, we will see their treachery." Mr Nepal, leader of the Communists, the second-biggest party, spoke by telephone. He is under house arrest and police prevented The Independent from meeting him.

Analysts say it was the talks between the Maoists and the parties that galvanised public opinion against the King. The party leaders promise to deliver peace, but the King insists there is a military solution.

"The tourists are not coming because of this situation," said Balaram Tamang, a shop-owner in Thamel. I want peace so we can do business. If the King could deliver peace I wouldn't mind living in an absolute monarchy, but he has not lived up to his promises."

The parties are demanding that the parliament be reopened, all-party discussions with the Maoists take place, and that the King act as a constitutional monarch.

"We have not yet come down in favour of a republic," Shobhakar Parajuli of the Congress Party, Nepal's biggest, said. "But if the King does not want to give the people their rights, naturally the people will say, 'Why should we have a monarchy?'."

In 1990, massive rallies culminated in a march on the royal palace, and the then king agreed to a constitutional monarchy, the first in Nepal's history.

Journalists and academics have been unusually outspoken in their criticism of the closure of Freezing Point and Li plans to complain formally about the propaganda department's action. The clampdown, he said, was "a step too far". Not content with ordering the closure, he added, the censors also ordered Chinese media not to report it.

China's newspapers are all under party control and dissent is not tolerated, but some outspoken editors, such as Li, have tried to push the envelope in the past few years and run critical stories.

Last year he attacked his employer over a plan to link journalists' salaries and bonuses to the amount of praise garnered from Communist officials. His complaint led to the appraisal system being scrapped. China Youth Daily, which boasts a circulation of 400,000, is the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party Youth League, which has 72 million members and is in effect Hu Jintao's power base.

A big problem for the censors was an essay by the historian Yuan Weishi, which suggested Chinese students were being "fed on wolf milk" and that Hong Kong textbooks gave better accounts of historical events such as the Opium Wars and the Boxer Uprising.

It has been a tough few weeks for freedom of information in China, with multinational internet companies, fearful of losing out on access to China's 111 million netizens, playing their part.

On Wednesday, Google announced it would bow to Beijing's demands that its Chinese website restrict access to information about controversial topics such as the Falun Gong religious movement, Tibetan independence and human rights.

Late last year, authorities removed the chief editor of the Beijing News. When the blogger Zhao Jing, better known as An Ti, wrote about the turmoil at the Beijing News, Microsoft shut the site down at the request of the Chinese government.

In April, Yahoo was accused of supplying data used as evidence to jail the Chinese journalist Shi Tao for 10 years. There are about 32 journalists and 50 "bloggers" in jail in China, including The New York Times news assistant Zhao Yan and Ching Cheong, The Straits Times correspondent accused of spying for Taiwan. This week has already seen Li Changqing, a reporter who wrote for Boxun, a US-based Chinese-language news site, put in prison for three years for spreading "alarmist information" about a dengue fever outbreak in 2004.

Under other circumstances, the reopening of the original J Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles - a painstakingly reproduced ancient Roman villa on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean - might have been cause for universal celebration. The villa, known as an intriguing mix of high art, patrician folly and sword-and-sandals Hollywood cheese, has been closed for renovation since 1997. Back then, the worst it had to worry about were the never-ending complaints of its litigious neighbours who didn't like the cars, or the noise, or the very prospect of vulgar museum-goers infesting their high-toned chunk of prize southern California real estate.

The Getty collections themselves - or rather, the tiny fraction of them that could reasonably be stuffed into any exhibition space - moved to a spanking new building in the hills a few miles inland, where architectural critics swooned over Richard Maier's deceptively simple white marble creation and visitors thrilled to the electric train ride sweeping them up the hill from a vast subterranean car park. The one thing any art lover or tourist has really missed for the past eight and half years has been the opportunity to languish in the beauties and eccentric ambition of the villa itself, a reconstructed and - naturally, this being Hollywood - reworked version of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, which is believed to have been occupied by Julius Caesar's father-in-law, among others, before the fateful eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD.

And yet tomorrow's grand public reopening of the Getty Villa is anything but a happy occasion. The collection of Greek and Roman antiquities it will showcase has become the object of a major international art theft scandal. The woman who did more than anyone to build up the Getty's extraordinary trove of antiquities, the longtime curator Marion True, is currently on trial in Rome on charges of criminal conspiracy. She resigned from the Getty in October.

The Italian and Greek governments are demanding the return of 46 pieces they believe they can prove to have been stolen, including some of the most prized antiquities now going on display at the villa. While the Getty is doing everything it can to play down the controversy in its public statements - it has repeatedly insisted that it has never knowingly acquired stolen artefacts - the organisation is clearly in a state of turmoil.

California's attorney general has opened an investigation into Barry Munitz, the chief executive of the $9bn (£5bn) Getty Trust, over allegations that he has abused the trust's charitable status to live high on the hog at the Getty's expense.

Over the years, Mr Munitz has charged the trust for luxury hotel rooms, a Tuscan villa rental, a yachting cruise along the Dalmatian coast and a new Porsche - all on top of his $1.2m annual salary. One US senator, who is also investigating, has alleged Mr Munitz and his friends have spent more time watching old episodes of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous than they have looking after the trust's interests.

The investigations have, in turn, precipitated a steady stream of departures and resignations. Deborah Gribbon, the museum director, quit in October 2004 over unspecified differences with Mr Munitz, and her interim replacement quickly made it clear he did not want the job either. Following them out the door have been Mr Munitz's chief of staff, the head of publications and the public relations manager. For the past year, the trust has outsourced the tricky job of defending its public reputation to a prominent firm of Hollywood spin-doctors.

Just this week, when the whole organisation should have been focused on the thrill of unveiling its $275m makeover of the Getty Villa, the bad karma continued with the resignation of Getty Trust board member Barbara Fleischman. Mrs Fleischman and her late husband sold part of their extensive antiquities collection to the Getty for $20m in 1996, and donated another $40m worth. To express their gratitude for the deal, they granted Marion True, the now disgraced antiquities curator, a loan of $400,000 so she could buy a holiday home in Greece from an art dealer with whom she was also conducting museum business. After years of secrecy, the whole clamorous conflict of interest has tumbled out over the past couple of months, not least thanks to some consistently aggressive reporting by the Los Angeles Times.

None of this, it must be said, has done anything to diminish the appeal of the new villa. Just 1,200 visitors will be allowed in each day - for reasons of space as well as the legal settlement reached with those litigious neighbours - and already all available reservations, running to the end of July, have been exhausted. The appeal, though, is no longer strictly one of artistic curiosity. To many Angelenos, the villa has taken on something of the fascination of a palace built for a Mafia don or a dictator. In the course of a preview visit at the villa last weekend, more than one person could be overheard joking that we had all better see the place quick before its treasures were shipped back to Europe.

The villa is certainly a marvel, with its marbled open-air peristyles, its lush Mediterranean vegetation and its views across a long open-air pool towards the cerulean Pacific. The drive is paved with imitation ancient-Roman cobblestones and the car park, once nestled underground, is now carved into the hillside. The architects who undertook the remodelling job, Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, have constructed a scenic walkway that brings visitors up over one side of the villa and down to a central staging area, with the atrium straight ahead, an outdoor amphitheatre to one side and study areas, an auditorium and café stretching away toward the back of the property.

It is hard, though, not to take in the sights as a sort of guided tour to the scandals, corruption and legal battles of the past few years. The amphitheatre, for starters, has the names Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman etched into its marble side. On the ground floor of the villa itself, it is almost impossible to miss the monumental limestone statue of Aphrodite (or possibly some other goddess) dating from the 5th century BC - a statue the Italian government says comes from the Greek archaeological site at Morgantina in Sicily whence it was spirited away by thieves.

The Getty bought the Aphrodite statue from the London antiquities dealer Robin Symes in 1986 for $18m. It has since been described as the greatest Greek sculpture in the United States. Some doubts have been expressed - especially by supporters of Dr True - that it can in fact be traced back to Morgantina. But internal notes and memos from the Getty leaked to the LA Times last year suggest the museum knew as far back as 1987 that it was possibly treading on shaky ground. "We know it's stolen," the then chief executive of the Getty Trust, Harold Williams, is quoted as saying in the museum director's notes. "Are we willing to buy stolen property for some higher aim?"

The Getty has suggested these sentiments were merely hypothetical, and has condemned the LA Times for what it says is the publication of stolen internal documents. The LA Times, in turn, says it breached no journalistic ethics and noted in one of its responses that the Getty did not challenge the authenticity of the documents themselves.

Those well versed in the Getty catalogue - and the trial unfolding in Rome - can spot many more examples of prized exhibits that may at some point elude the Getty's grasp. In the documents leaked to the LA Times, the Getty's own lawyers estimate that 82 of its artworks risked having their provenance investigated, including 54 items classified as masterpieces.

In some ways, there is nothing new about any of these controversies. J Paul Getty's very first antiquities acquisition, a terracotta sculpture of a reclining female that he bought from Sotheby's in 1939, turned out to be a fake, a 19th-century imitation. Even after the Getty Villa opened in 1974, much anxiety focused on the authenticity of one of the prize exhibits: a kouros, or statue of a naked young man. After many years of argument back and forth, the Getty has chosen to label the piece "Greek, circa 530 BC or modern forgery".

Debate rages as to whether things have got worse in the past few years - the Munitz allegations have not helped in this regard - or whether, despite all appearances, they have in fact got better. Italy now has a law safeguarding against at least some art thefts, which it did not have when the late Mr Getty first started throwing around his oil millions and acquiring whatever he could. The Getty itself, meanwhile, has established a policy to try to avoid the embarrassment of ending up with stolen goods - a policy written, intriguingly, by Marion True.

There is certainly nothing new about the stench of impropriety that hangs about the collection. "Something about the place embarrasses people," Joan Didion wrote a long time ago. She, and others, have argued that this is not entirely inappropriate, given the decadence and corruption of the ancient Roman villa culture it seeks to imitate, not to mention the broader context of America as the sole global superpower, the new Rome.

As the LA Times critic Christopher Knight observed this week: "The disinterred Getty Villa is gorgeous, vulgar, filled with astounding treasure, tainted by corruption, often brilliant, more than a little decadent - not unlike the vivid twilight of the [Roman] Empire itself."

The 11,000 square foot estate, with its nine bedrooms and eight bathrooms -- and eight surveillance cameras -- has been on the market for three months.

Only six prospective buyers have checked it out, the Arizona Republic says. That led to a half-million-dollar price cut.

A year ago, there were 145 homes priced at $500,000 or more for sale in Phoenix. Now, there are 1,341. Houses were selling in days last year, but now, it's taking an average of six weeks.

McCain and his wife, Cindy, who grew up in the house, want to downsize.

In the three months after Ms. Winfrey chose "A Million Little Pieces" as part of her television book club, more than two million copies were sold, making it the fastest-selling book in the club's 10-year history. Alternately appearing to fight back tears and displaying vivid anger at the author and his publisher, Nan A. Talese, who heads an imprint of Random House's Doubleday division, Ms. Winfrey stared straight at Mr. Frey and asked, "Why would you lie?"

"I made a mistake," Mr. Frey (pronounced fry) replied, adding that he had developed a tough-guy image of himself as a "coping mechanism" to help address his alcohol and drug addiction. "And when I was writing the book," he said, "instead of being as introspective as I should have been, I clung to that image."

It was a stunning bit of drama that had people throughout the publishing industry glued to their television sets yesterday afternoon.

The confrontation on Ms. Winfrey's show was the culmination of events that began with a report on Jan. 8 by The Smoking Gun, an investigative Web site, that found multiple discrepancies between Mr. Frey's life and his account in the book. Among the site's findings were that Mr. Frey had spent only a few hours in jail, not nearly three months as he had written.

On Jan. 11, Mr. Frey appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live" and, while acknowledging that he had fabricated some parts of his account, defended its overall message. "I still stand by my book. I still stand by the fact that it's my story. It's a truthful retelling of the story," he said. In a last-minute call to Mr. King's show, Ms. Winfrey defended the book as the "essential truth" of his life and said the controversy was "much ado about nothing."

But yesterday Ms. Winfrey apologized to her audience for that call. "I regret that phone call," she said. "I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter. And I am deeply sorry about that, because that is not what I believe." She added, "To everyone who has challenged me on this issue of truth, you are absolutely right."

She then confronted Mr. Frey about his fabrications, leading him to admit that in addition to exaggerating the amount of time he had spent in jail, he had lied about how his girlfriend had died; about the details of a foray outside a rehabilitation center; and about his claim that he had received a root canal without anesthesia because the center prohibited the use of Novocaine.

"I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate, absolutely," Mr. Frey said yesterday of the Smoking Gun report.

Ms. Winfrey also acknowledged that she had received an early warning that parts of "A Million Little Pieces" were fictionalized from a former counselor at the center where the book takes place. Eight days after she picked the book in September, a former counselor at Hazelden, the Minnesota treatment center now identified as the one where Mr. Frey stayed, contacted her producers and told them that many parts of the book were untrue.

Ms. Winfrey said that she had had her producers ask the publisher about the allegations, but that they were reassured the book was accurate. She had harsh words during the broadcast for the publisher, Ms. Talese, who said that neither she nor anyone at Doubleday had investigated the accuracy of Mr. Frey's book. She said the company first learned that parts of the book had been made up when The Smoking Gun published its report, nearly two years after the memoir was first published.

"An author brings his book in and says that it is true, it is accurate, it is his own," Ms. Talese said. "I thought, as a publisher, this is James's memory of the hell he went through and I believed it."

But Ms. Winfrey pointed out that her producers had asked about reports of the book's truth in September, after the Hazelden counselor raised doubts, and that they were reassured by Random House.

"We asked if you, your company, stood behind James's book as a work of nonfiction at the time, and they said absolutely," Ms. Winfrey said. "And they were also asked if their legal department had checked out the book, and they said yes. So in a press release sent out for the book in 2004 by your company, the book was described as brutally honest and an altering look at — at addiction. So how can you say that if you haven't checked it to be sure?"

Ms. Talese replied that while the Random House legal department checks nonfiction books to make sure that no one is defamed or libeled, it does not check the truth of the assertions made in a book.

Ms. Winfrey replied, "Well, that needs to change."

In a statement issued yesterday afternoon, Random House's Doubleday and Anchor Books divisions, which published the book in hardcover and paperback respectively, said they were delaying the printing and shipping of any more copies of "A Million Little Pieces" to include statements from both the publisher and the author noting that "a number of facts have been altered and incidents embellished."

Mr. Frey's second book, "My Friend Leonard," published by Penguin's Riverhead Books, has also been a best seller. It includes a disclaimer that some names and details have been altered, but makes no mention that some events — like the opening anecdote, which takes place during a jail term that it is now clear Mr. Frey never served — are complete fiction.

In a statement, Penguin said it was considering what action to take regarding its book. About a contract it recently signed for two more books from Mr. Frey, the company said: "The ground has shifted. It's under discussion."

Mr. Frey has previously said he offered "A Million Little Pieces" to publishers first as a work of fiction, then as a memoir. But he has also said that in changing the book's designation from fiction to nonfiction, he did not change anything in it.

One former publisher said he believed that the publishing industry would have to change its practices at the behest of its biggest patron, Ms. Winfrey. Laurence J. Kirshbaum, who recently retired as the chief executive of the Time Warner Book Group and who now runs his own literary agency, said in an interview yesterday that "there is no question what she said will have a far-reaching impact on our business."

"Agents, publishers and authors are all going to have to be much more cautious in the way they approach the nonfiction market," Mr. Kirshbaum said. "Traditionally, publishers have not done fact-checking and vetting. But I think you are going to see memoirs read not only from a libel point of view but for factual accuracy. And where there are questions of possible exaggeration or distortion, the author is going to need to produce documentation."

Mr. Frey had previously claimed that he had documents supporting his story. In an interview in December with The New York Times, Mr. Frey said that he had provided more than 400 pages of medical records and other documentation for his book both to his publisher and to Ms. Winfrey's producers. Among the records, he said, was proof of his claim that he received a root canal without anesthesia.

Asked yesterday by Ms. Winfrey about the dental episode, he replied, "I wrote it from memory," a statement that elicited gasps from Ms. Winfrey's audience. He added, "I honestly have no idea" whether or not he received Novocaine or any other painkiller.

The more Mr. Frey revealed, the more heated his confrontation with Ms. Winfrey became. "Since that time, I've struggled with the idea of it — " he began to say in reference to his root canal, only to be cut off by Ms. Winfrey.

"No," she said, "the lie of it. That's a lie. It's not an idea, James, that's a lie."